


Connection

by ELG



Series: Place of Safety series [2]
Category: X-Men (Original Timeline Movies)
Genre: Gen, Past Child Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-01-09 21:08:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1150809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ELG/pseuds/ELG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With Scott and Jean's assistance, Logan tries to remember saving Scott on the Island. The consequences are not what they expect.</p><p>(Gen/pre-slash in this part with nothing romantic between Scott/Logan as yet.)</p><p>Written for the Scogan_5_Word_Challenge. 5 words: prospect, receiving, mark, improvement, drive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Connection

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scottxlogan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scottxlogan/gifts).



##### Place of Safety

##### 2\. Connection

Jean was alone in the kitchen when Logan got back. She looked beautiful, as always, but pensive, and she smelled like Scott. The pair of them always smelled of the same soap, the same shampoo, all lemon-fresh and orange-blossom from where her perfume transferred itself to his skin. He wondered if they tasted the same when you licked them. Jean was toying with a bowl of neatly chopped fruit segments with no visible enthusiasm. 

Logan said, "Why do women do that? If you want ice cream, eat ice cream."

She said, "I thought I was the mind-reader?" She did not, however, demur when he got out the ice cream and pushed it to her end of the table. She absently flicked open the silverware drawer and had a spoon fly into her hand. "So I hear you're going to stick around?"

He said, far less provocatively than he would have done with Scott, "Do you want me to?"

"Yes."

No hesitation, he noticed, but she hadn't looked into his eyes with longing. Perhaps a girl got out of the habit of gazing into eyes with longing when the eyes of her lover were always hidden behind rose quartz, or perhaps Logan's just weren't the eyes she wanted to be looking into. Her gaze was still on some distant horizon that he suspected only telepaths could see. "Why?"

She did look at him then, tawny-eyes green-flecked with wisdom. "Because this is where you're meant to be. Don't tell me you don't know that, because I know you do. We've all of us been in the places where we don't belong, and then come here. We all know the difference."

"Were you with Scott when he was in that…compound place?"

"No. Emma was." She wrinkled her very attractive nose in a way that suggested that 'Emma' was not her favorite person in the world and she was not in favor of her being in close proximity to Scott. If he'd been a gambling man, Logan would have laid odds on 'Emma' being a pert-breasted blonde.

Jean said, "Why do you want to know?"

"Xavier thinks I was there, too. I don't remember it. It must have been just before I lost my memory. Has Scott ever said anything about it…?"

Jean looked bemused. "Nothing."

"Do you have a picture of him from that time? Maybe it would shake something loose…."

Jean didn't even have to go upstairs; she pulled a little album out of her purse, and flicked back through it. He caught glimpses of a younger Jean with waist-length hair; apparently she had never gone through an awkward phase, because she was stunning in every shot. There were also pictures of Cyclops. A lot of pictures of Cyclops. He was repellently good-looking in all of them, even at the age when he should have had the decency to have zits. 

He found himself scanning them with far more attention than could pass for casual interest, still looking for confirmation that everything Xavier had put in his head had just been to get Logan on board, that Scott had never been that poor, abused boy. The pictures didn’t really help with that. She pulled them out of the wallet and passed them over so he could look at them more closely and one of them provided exactly the proof he’d been hoping not to find.

“This one…? That was when he first came here, right?”

Scott wasn’t looking at the camera. He was huddled in an armchair, reading Nietzsche, hiding behind his bangs, and he was so damned thin that Logan could remember exactly how that had felt, feeling the lightness of him in his arms, the edges of his bones. He was wearing a t-shirt that was too big for him, his bony arms jutting from it. He had band-aids on his upper arms, ugly bruises on his wrists, and uglier bruises still on his scrawny little throat.

Jean grabbed that picture back from him a little too fast, fingers fanning to cover it protectively. “Sorry – you shouldn’t have seen that one. Scott doesn’t know I have it. Henry took it on the first day he came to the mansion.”

So the beatings from the Jack Winters guy had been real. He could see the son-of-a-bitch’s fingermarks on Scott’s throat where the abusive bastard had obviously tried to choke him half to death.

Logan said, “I know about the orphanage. I know about Winters.” After a beat, he found himself adding gruffly, “And I’m sorry – that Scott had such a shitty childhood. I didn’t know until today.”

Jean looked at him intently and then nodded. She handed the pictures back, and he appreciated the gesture but he suspected Scott wouldn’t. Both Xavier and Jean were entrusting Logan with Scott’s childhood traumas, and he appreciated what that meant, he really did, and he was touched that they had made that leap of faith in him, but it bothered him as well, because Scott only half-trusted him. He probably trusted him in the Danger Room, with the kids, and maybe on a mission, but he was nothing like at a place where he trusted Logan with his past, and everyone kept gift-wrapping Scott’s past for him like it was a birthday present. 

Logan realized then that he wanted Scott’s trust. The prospect of it was oddly enticing – perhaps because he now knew that Scott wasn’t the preppy, privileged trust fund brat he’d thought he was. Sure, his adopted daddy did indeed buy him bikes and cars and jets and someone – probably Jean – bought him those very nice clothes that hung so stylishly on his very nice body, but that was armor. No wonder the kid was so preternaturally poised. He must live in fear of men like Logan seeing beneath the surface and realizing that, beneath the black leather and the imperturbable calm, he was scarred and he was vulnerable. If there had been a time since he had met Scott when he would have wanted to hold that over him, that time had passed. In fact, after receiving that good old fashioned mindscrew from Xavier, that time was well past.

_Xavier, you son-of-a-bitch, at least next time have the decency to buy me dinner first._

He leafed through the pictures, arranging them in order of age. Two pictures in, Scott was taller than the boy he’d kidnapped in that Xavier mind-fuck scenario but still skinny. Thinking of his leanly muscled body now, Logan realized that it hadn’t come easily. It must have taken countless hours in the Danger Room for that scrawny ninety-pound weakling to turn himself into that ripped abbed walking supermodel. A few more pictures and Scott was taller and had lost that broken-spirited look. He was looking up at the camera, no longer hiding behind his bangs; in a few he was even smiling. He was, given his age, repellently clear-skinned and ridiculously good looking.

Logan pointed out how disgusting that was – looking like a Versace model at barely seventeen. "He didn't do it on purpose," Jean assured him. "He didn't even know he was handsome."

"You didn't tell him?"

"I was shy."

"Well, did he at least tell you that _you_ were gorgeous?"

"He was shy, too."

"That's pathetic. If I'd been here I'd have smacked you both upside the head until you bought a clue."

She laughed. "Lucky for us you weren't, then. We got there in the end, we just – took the scenic route." 

He looked at the photographs again and they certainly were scenic. It was like watching two long-legged fawns taking their first tentative steps through the big bad forest. They were so _young_. Looking at these pictures and knowing that this must be what Xavier was remembering every time he sent them out on a mission, he found it very difficult not to forgive him…pretty much anything he might ever have done to try to keep them safe. 

He looked back at the pictures of teenage Cyclops, willing a mental connection to come to mind, but there was nothing. "Xavier says I helped Scott escape from that Island place, but I don't remember seeing him before – Scott didn't look familiar when I saw him here, and he doesn't look familiar in these pictures either, which he should if we've met before. He hasn't really changed, after all."

"I think you know how much he would _not_ appreciate you saying that."

"Wait until you get to my age, then you'll realize how damned young everyone else looks, and how damned old you feel."

"You don't look so bad for your age, Methuselah." 

Given that she had jade lights dancing in her eyes, and the way a curl of light was cutting through the window to turn her cropped hair to a blaze of amber flame, he thought he was showing enormous restraint not to kiss her. On the other hand, those photographs had really brought it home to him how much history she and Cyke had. Maybe Summers was way too uptight to deserve a woman like Jean Grey, but they had a shared history that Logan couldn't hope to match. As far as he was aware, after all, Logan didn't have a shared history with anyone.

He handed back the photographs. "If Cyclops and I were in the same place at the same time back then, I think those memories are gone for good, because nothing's shaking loose."

"Why don't you ask Scott about it? Maybe he'll remember something you don't?"

He grimaced. "Because I don't want to bring up bad memories if…shit happened to him in that place. He can't have been much older than Jubilee. Being at the mercy of a mutant-hating bastard like Stryker is probably something he doesn't need to think about too often, and I don't need to know about my past enough to piss all over his."

"It's okay, Logan."

He looked around in shock because he wasn't used to being caught unawares, but, of course, with Scott and Jean smelling the same, it wasn't always easy to know which one was there, and so Scott had arrived while he was talking to Jean again, and was now standing in the kitchen doorway, impassively unreadable behind his permanent shades.

Logan grimaced. "It's not important."

"Yes it is." Scott came in with a little less than his usual poise. "You have the right to your own past – or at least the parts of it that can be unearthed. If I know something that would help fill in a few blanks, I want to help. It's not like I don't have my own gaps."

Logan wondered how many of those gaps were due to him being experimented on while an abused orphan and how many were due to Charles Xavier doing some psychic housekeeping so Scott Summers could grow up to be more than just his childhood traumas. If Xavier had been messing with the kid's head, he didn't really approve. On the other hand you didn't need to be a collector of porcelain tea cups to understand the temptation to take fragile, damaged things and glue closed the cracks so they appeared never to have been broken.

Scott said, "Jean – can you help me remember more about what happened in that compound?"

Logan said, "I think Sabretooth was there."

Unflinchingly, Scott said, "He was the one who caught me for Stryker."

If there had been a reverse gear available for this conversation, Logan would have been grinding metal trying to find it. "Look – Scott, I don't want to be a dick here –"

"Well then, I guess there really is a first time for everything."

"I've seen the pictures, Slim. Back then you were just the kind of toothsome little morsel that Sabretooth liked to snack on. If something like that happened, I don't see it doing anyone any good for you to be remembering it."

He had temporarily silenced Cyclops who needed two attempts to recover from Logan showing actual concern for him before he said, with commendable calm, "As far as I'm aware, Logan, Sabretooth scared the crap out of me, but he didn't do anything else to me. I'm not saying I didn't have nightmares, but they were all about him chasing me through the school, not…other stuff."

Jean was looking at Logan in dawning horror. "You think Sabretooth might have…?"

"I think he would have wanted to. Hell, looking at your pretty boy boyfriend, there – who, if we're being honest, still doesn't look old enough to vote – I'd be amazed if Sabretooth doesn't still want to. I'm ready to believe he didn't. I just don't want to trip some kind of memory landmine."

Cyclops was turning the matter over with impersonal detachment. "I wasn't really physically injured when I came here. I was a little bruised and I had some tazer burns, but nothing else. I think we're good to go."

Logan blinked. "Good to go where?"

Cyclops turned to Jean. "You can link Logan to my memories, can't you? He may see something in there that he recognizes."

"You're okay with giving me that kind of access?" Logan didn't attempt to hide his disbelief.

Cyclops gave him a tight little smile. "Logan, if it's between you in my head or Jean in yours, I'll take the option that doesn't involve Jean every time."

Logan said, "What exactly do you think is in my mind that you don't want your girlfriend seeing, Scott?"

"I asked Hank to walk me through it. Apparently, there tend to be two reasons why the brain doesn't remember events – because it physically can't or because it psychologically doesn't want to. Your healing factor makes option number two the most likely option. Of course, it could heal a brain injury and leave you with amnesia all the same. I'm just saying that maybe you don't remember some past events because they're better forgotten."

Logan gazed into Scott's visor, wishing, not for the first time, that he could see his eyes. "Do you think I'm a war criminal?"

"I think that to have molten metal injected into your body so it can wrap itself around your skeleton must have been excruciatingly painful, and, as your body would reject any anesthetic, I'm presuming you were conscious at the time. If your mind is putting up mental blocks to stop you from remembering that procedure – it may be doing it for a good reason."

So they had both walked gingerly around the primordial swamp of the other's possible past now, and both had felt it likely that a dip in the tar pits would be more pleasant. 

Logan said, "So, if it turns out you got a date you didn't want with Sabretooth but I got to scream in agony all through being metal-plated, which one of us wins the prize?"

Scott carefully did not look at Jean as he selected an apple from the fruit bowl, gave it a brisk polish on his shirt front and then tossed it to Logan. "You _have_ a metal-bonded skeleton, Logan. The adamantium got in there, somehow, and however it was done, it wouldn't have been enjoyable. Whereas if Sabretooth has ever known me, biblically, do you really think he wouldn't have mentioned it in all the times we've met up since? Because I think he would have put it on a t-shirt by now."

Jean looked at her watch. "Now, do I need to fetch a tape measure or are you two done?"

Logan, who was particularly secure in that area, said, "Personally, I'm happy for you to fetch a tape measure."

Cyclops grinned unexpectedly, and Logan kind of wished he wouldn't, because every time Scott just sucked up a zinger and found it funny, instead of puffing up his chest, it made Logan kind of like him. Xavier had already mind-fucked him into feeling protective of the guy – he really didn't need the extra burden of _liking_ him as well.

 

And, somehow, Logan had forgotten that life was always worse than you thought. That pain hurt more and there were depths of darkness in yourself and in other men that you thought you knew about, and then the diving bell fell further in and you were mapping Challenger Deep. You were so far down your soles were scorching from the fires of hell, because you were a murderer and men were scum.

_War and war and death and death. He was wading in blood. Here for Victor, but getting too used to the stink of carbine himself. His father’s rage was in him too. There were deeps of it he did not want to reach._

So many tortured children. God, they were screaming in their cages, because they’d been operated on like laboratory animals and then thrown back into their prisons like trash, and they were shell-shocked with pain and trauma. 

_His claws were slicing into human flesh and he was reveling in the blood. He wanted to rip these sons of bitches open. He wanted to enjoy their deaths._

The guy with the claws came in and Scott cringed, trying to be brave but scrambling backwards, because this man scared him worse than Stryker, worse than the scalpels the scientists wielded. The man smiled and flexed his claws, hypnotizing Scott with their yellow, curving strength. “I’m Victor,” he said. “This is where I put my mark on you. This is where you learn your place.”

Scott said, “Please…don’t…” like he had said before. 

Victor’s smile grew wider. “I love it when little boys and girls beg me for mercy.” 

And then he was on him, and his strength was incredible, so was his speed; an animal in human form. He ripped off Scott’s clothes and he spat in his hand and Scott understood and didn’t at the same time. Like his mental processes were working fine, computing what this meant, what Winters had told him enough times he would make him do with rough men in doorways who stank of old sweat if he even thought about trying to run away from him the way he’d run away from Milbury. Scott had understood enough to be afraid of that being done to him; but there had always been a part of his mind that thought that it wouldn’t happen all the same; that the world was too good a place, underneath the cruelty, to let that be done to him. Victor tore through that protective barrier with his first brutal thrust. Then he shredded it like confetti….

_The needles went in and the metal went in and the pain was indescribable. The pain was beyond anything. He could feel it changing him from something human into something bestial because no human could survive this level of agony, only the strongest animal that ever crawled out of hell could take this pain into itself and live, and even then it was at the cost of unleashing every atom of its inner darkness…._

“Professor!” 

Jean screamed for him, physically and telepathically, and Xavier came wheeling himself in at a dangerous speed to find Scott and Logan both screaming, too. Scott was on the floor, curled up with his hands wrapped around his head, while he screamed, and Logan was wild-eyed and dangerous, claws out to the utmost, slashing at imaginary foes. His mind was ablaze with indescribable pain.

“Now, Jean,” he ordered. “Combine your mind with mine, and help me break the connection.”

They went in together to the red-roaring rage-room that was Logan’s tortured mind, and found the seared, bruised wreckage that was Scott’s once orderly consciousness, that his resurrected memory of Victor Creed had ripped apart like a hungry bear seeking honey. Jean had let the connection become a writhing series of tendrils, a root system binding them to each other and their buried pasts. She had been trying desperately to saw through them but the spiny shoots were impervious. 

“Change the connection,” Xavier ordered. “It’s as fine as tissue paper, Jean. You can tear it with a thought….”

Slowly, Jean let go of the thick, green tendrils, gradually she let them turn to a few paper chains, and, together, they tore them, disconnecting their minds from each other and the past.

Logan hit the floor with his knees and just swayed there for a moment before his claws slowly slipped back in and he put his hands to his head. “Oh my god…” he breathed, and then: “Scott!” He was there before Jean or Xavier could move, scrambling across the floor to grab Scott by the shoulders and pull him up, almost roughly. He pulled him in against his chest and wrapped a protective arm around him, when Jean made to go forward, Xavier grabbed her arm and held her back.

“Not just yet, Jean.”

It took her a moment to realize what he had already seen, not just in Logan’s mind but in his body-language, that raging protectiveness of the boy he had just watched brutally raped by a sadistic animal twice his size, and the Scott who had just been through that telepathic memory unearthed ordeal with him. Still, Xavier expected Scott to push Logan off, shuddering, unable to bear being touched by a man after what he had just been through, but instead Scott’s fingers twisted into Logan’s shirt and held on tight.

With a shock, Xavier realized that Logan was holding the adult Scott the way he had held the child, his mouth against his hair, his arms around him, daring all comers to try to hurt this boy while he had a breath in his body.

Scott drew in a shuddering breath and then said, “Logan…what they did to you….”

“It’s done now,” Logan said brusquely. He stroked a rough hand through Scott’s dark hair, still holding him tightly with his other arm. His eyes were returning to their normal color from that awful amber glare but he was not relaxing his hold on Scott. Xavier kept his own hold on Jean’s arm. Logan was on a hair-trigger right now. It was probably taking all the self-control he had to keep his claws in. One movement towards Scott right now and Xavier suspected that someone was going to get stabbed. 

It took an endless ten minutes before there was any real improvement, then, at length, Scott’s breath stopped sobbing in his throat and Logan’s breathing slowed from the quick, harsh pants of an animal at bay.

Jean said, “I’m so sorry…” eyes bright with tears.

“Not your fault,” Logan said thickly. “This was on Stryker.” Scott shuddered just at the name and Logan said, “Sabretooth needs to die now.”

Xavier said, “Logan – I’m sorry you got those memories back in such an excruciating fashion, but as you have them now, you surely know that it was your lust for revenge against Sabretooth that led you to becoming a laboratory experiment in the first place. That isn’t the path you want to take this time.”

“You didn’t see what he did to Scott!”

Xavier tightened his grip on Jean’s arm as she made to go and wrap Scott in her loving embrace, because there was still a lot of animal there. “I saw it in the past. I walled it up so that Scott wouldn’t have to deal with that on top of everything else. Scott, I’m sorry – sorry that was done to you and sorry that I hid it from you, but I thought it was for the best….”

Scott drew a shuddering breath and straightened up – Logan slackening his protective grip on him only reluctantly. There was the same mixture of confusion and dignity that Xavier remembered from their first meeting, that kind, decent boy unable to comprehend why there were people in the world who took such pleasure in hurting him when he couldn’t understand what he had done to make them hate him.

 _But why does Stryker hate us so much? Why did he do those things to us? Why did he let that man…?_

Perhaps Xavier had been weak, but he hadn’t been able to bear Scott’s bewilderment or his despair. The boy had been targeted by four men in succession for their focused abuse: Sinister with his experiments, Winters with his exploitation and violence, Stryker with his kidnap and laboratory torture, and Sabretooth with his rape. Small wonder that that perfectly innocent and perfectly lovable boy had taken from that combined experience that there was something in himself that was clearly hateful. Xavier had not been able to bear Scott thinking that, when he was so innocent of any wrongdoing and yet so utterly convinced that he must be at fault.

_It isn’t you, my boy. It’s nothing you did and nothing that you are. You’ve just been…._

_Unlucky?_ That broken laugh that would have sounded too old on a man twice his age. _Professor, no one’s that unlucky. There must be something in me that makes other people hate me. There must be something wrong with me for people to keep wanting to hurt me like this._

So he had blurred some memories, softened the edges of them, and he had walled others up where Scott couldn’t find them. He had not regretted it. The boy had thrived. Xavier had left Winters, alone, as a memory more or less untouched. It was as well that Scott knew there were bad mutants in the world as well as ordinary humans, and the man’s abuse of him had been so unreasonable and his threats so unjust that Scott had been able to see them for the bullying cowardice that they were. But he had not needed to remember all the Byzantine complications of Sinister’s total control over his environment, nor needed to know that he had been part of a particularly cruel experiment, and the Island… he had left him the memory of his capture and his escape. He had blurred the memory of the experiments done on him, and Sabretooth…? What possible need was there for the boy Scott had been to remember what that animal had done to him?

Scott got up with tattered dignity and dusted himself off. He did not look at any of them but he held out a hand to Logan, and when the man clasped it, he pulled him to his feet. Addressing the space between Xavier and Jean he said, “I’m going for a drive. I’ll be back for supper.”

Xavier had thought for a moment that Scott really was going to walk out on all of them without a backward glance, even at the man with the claws who was watching him with brooding, troubled eyes; the telepathic connection between them undoubtedly severed, but another one so obviously in place that Xavier could almost see the threads binding them to one another. Scott paused in the doorway and looked over his shoulder. Xavier suspected that he had never been so grateful to live behind a ruby quartz visor.

Scott said, “Thank you, Logan.”

Roughly, Logan said, “For what?”

“You saved me from Sabretooth and Stryker. You were the one who got us all out of that place. I owe you one.”

“You don’t owe me a damn thing,” Logan said brusquely. “You and Storm already saved me from Sabretooth. Far as I’m concerned – we’re even.”

Scott just gave a tight little nod that Xavier knew, from nearly a decade of parenting him, meant that he didn’t agree but wasn’t going to argue the point now. He wondered if Logan knew that as well now, and felt a completely unlooked for stab of resentment that Logan had just forged that savage, vital link with Scott after such a brief acquaintance, when a day since he had been almost a stranger. His reaction took him by surprise because he had wanted them to connect. He had manipulated Logan so that they would connect, feeling it was necessary if they were to help each other on missions. There had to be sympathy and understanding between them, and Logan needed to grasp that Scott was not some child of privilege, the spoiled adopted son of a doting millionaire, but a victim and a survivor, like Logan himself. This, though, this link between them, this was unlooked for, beyond his control and his expectation, and he was not sure what to make of it.

He’d had these contradictory impulses where Scott was concerned in the past, over Magneto. He had wanted the children to see that Erik Lehnsherr was not just a villain; that he was a damaged hero of courage and integrity; he had wanted Erik to see that these children were not just negligible pets of Xavier’s, there to be swatted aside and sent home bruised and chastened, but people in their own rights, with opinions that mattered. Yet, whenever Scott and Erik had even the glimmering of a meeting of minds, he had felt resentful and wanted to separate them. 

Xavier realized, with a sense of shock, that for all these years he had been thinking of his adoption of Scott as something he had done only for Scott’s sake, to keep the boy safe from more abusers who might be able to prey on him if they could bring some false claim to his guardianship. He had genuinely not realized until this moment that his pride in the way that damaged boy he had taken in had grown up, was, indeed, parental. He loved David, but the boy’s mutation had left him apparently unsalvageable. He was a heartbreak and an unhealing wound. Although he was his biological son, he was not a son any father could be proud of. Meaning that all of his frustrated paternal ambitions had, it seemed, been redirected towards Scott. He had known he loved him, of course, but he had not realized until this minute that he did not think of him as entirely separate from himself, in the way he did with the other children whom he loved and wished to protect. He had the bad as well as the good impulses of a father where Scott was concerned and he loved him as an extension of himself as well as in his own right. Perhaps that was why his need to protect him from harm was stronger than his need to let Scott stand on his own two feet.

Looking across at Logan now, breathing hard as he tried to claw back the control that was still threatening to desert him, Xavier realized that he might, indeed, be no better than this raw, soul-rent Logan when it came to wanting to keep Scott safe. That he might, in fact, have set all of this in train, even though he thought this was not what he had intended. What truly had he expected Logan to do once those questions had been raised in his mind? Hadn’t he expected him to dig deeper? Hadn’t he thought he might go to Jean for help? Hadn’t he known, secretly, that Scott would always do the right thing, even at his own expense, even for a man he didn’t much like? Hadn’t he, in fact, been contriving events so that exactly _this_ would occur? And all for the ignominiously unelevated and thoroughly ordinary reason that his son was vulnerable in a dangerous world and that berserker mutant with the healing factor and adamantium claws, might, if properly manipulated, be the perfect man to keep him safe? His elevated need to save Logan from himself and help him to find his inner better man, not to mention giving him a role where he could help mutants instead of hurting them, as his half-brother had ended up doing, had that all been window dressing for a primordial recognition that this man had what no one else in the mansion had? The necessary darkness to go up against villains and fight fire with fire. To get an occasionally dirty job done so that Scott wouldn’t have to and Scott would be doubly protected – he could remain a hero who did not have to do the dark things, and he would have a man between himself and danger who had healing factor, an unbreakable skeleton, and decades of just rage.

Xavier wheeled himself backwards with a jolt that shook the kitchen cupboards, because he felt, in that moment, weakly and vulnerably, all too human. He had let Scott and Logan get tortured so that his son would be safer. He had done a terrible thing for a selfish, purely paternal reason. He did not like himself very much right now, and yet – and this was the even more terrible part – he would have done it again. 

Logan ran a ragged hand through his hair. The air was still echoing from his tortured screams. Scott had felt that molten metal sear its way so agonizingly into Logan’s body just as Logan had felt that vicious, thrusting cock tear into Scott’s. And still, _still_ Xavier would not have undone it. He hated himself and felt a strange, secret pride because he had outthought himself so well; sneaked under a surface layer of good intentions to do something utterly selfish that had been completely successful.

They all heard the sound of Scott’s motorbike as the engine caught and roared as he sped down the drive; speeding, of course, because Scott drove to the edge of his reflexes just to keep them honed, and his reflexes were extraordinarily fast. 

Jean crossed to the window to watch him go, mournful and sympathetic, wanting to put her arms around him and hold him close. Xavier felt just a pang there because he had a feeling that the psychic link between Jean, forged by her so gently between them, with much the same consideration and kindness that she had used to initiate Scott into the mysteries of physical love all those years ago, was now far less vivid in Scott’s mind than that crudely grappling-ironed connection that now existed between Scott and Logan. If the link between Jean and Scott had been sewn with delicate stitches, the one between Scott and Logan had been as subtle as a double-headed spike thrust into their brains. It had been a fully interactive, brutally invasive experience and it had left them shaken, damaged, and inextricably bound to one another.

Behind Jean’s back, Logan lowered his voice to say, “Look, Chuck. Just so you know – I’m probably not gonna take it too well for a while if any harm comes to the Boy Scout. Anyone hurts him right now in front of me – they’re probably gonna die bloody.”

Xavier said calmly, “I recognize that Logan. An inevitable consequence that can’t really be helped. Just try to keep as much of a rein on your temper as you can.” He wheeled himself out of the kitchen, resisting the urge to telepathically tell Logan: _I’m glad_. Better if no one knew that. Better if he continued to be the advocate for self-control and moderation. Still, when he thought of that amber flash in Logan’s eyes when he had his arms around Scott, he couldn’t help a spike of sheer jubilation. 

_Try and hurt my son again, Sinister, Winters, Stryker, Creed, or anyone else. You’re not just up against a man in a wheelchair now. You’re up against the Wolverine._

_Good luck with that._

##### End


End file.
